[Lyft] Improve shared ride routing efficiency

Ride sharing is something amazing and it is a blessing for the students who are trying to get from point A to point B at the affordable costs during the time when the public transports is not available. Here I just want to pen down couple of experiences mentioned by the lyft and uber driver while I rode with them last weekend Ride share experience with Lyft- I booked a lyft line for me and driver came within 2 minutes. We started our journey towards my destination towards North Boston. While being 5 minutes into ride, two riders got added into the lyft and we had to take a U turn to pick them and we rode almost 2 miles south to pick them. I thought lyft might have added them as they were also going towards North Boston and it made sense, but when we looked they were going towards East Boston. The person driving us was furious as he told me this was not the first time it has been happening, it happens to him on a daily basis. Being curious i asked him what might be the reason, he told many drivers dont want to accept share rides, as it makes you go around, thus number of drivers who accept share are less, whereas riders who want to take lyft line are more. So at any given point of time there aren't many share riders who are active thus it leads to such unreasonable route redirection. It was an interesting idea and made a lot of sense. Then I asked him, as Lyft line passengers are more, don't the drivers want to earn more money by signing up for that. He told, difference between the money which they gained while waiting for individual rides and completing them was equivalent to the shared driving. The experience of participating in shared driving was horrible. The reasons cited by him for horrible experience are as following Sometimes they need to move in circles as most of the roads in Boston are one way and it becomes difficult during peak time traffic Customers are not happy as they have to move around the city and they feel angry thus they take out anger on the drivers thus making the whole experience inconvenient If they cancel the ride pickup, they get bad reviews on the profile thus leading to bad reputation, very few features are available to them so that they can cancel Ride Share experience with UBER- In a similar manner as above I took ride share in uber and was trying to go from point A to point B. it was a big vehicle and he accepted the ride share as their were not many individual passengers taking the ride. The moment he picked me up he got another ride share request. We went to pick that person up and immediately he got another request from the same location where he picked me up. And when we went back to the location and picked passenger up, he had looped almost 4 times in the past 10 minutes and our relative displacement was really less. He was already kind of angry and was cursing the algorithms for not having specific pickup points. Situation became wasn't coordial in the last pickup as the passenger/customer was a little weak in english and was standing on the other side of the road. Driver informed and communicated to him that he needs to cross the road but he said he needs the pickup from where he called. Eventually Driver ended up cancelling the ride for that person and we were enroute for my destination. It appeared it will take me forever as all the later pick off had early dropoff and optimized route option made me to be dropped off in the end. I was pissed, but was fine as it was costly to take individual ride. While he dropped off passengers he also picked some more and the process went on. Ride which was supposedly completing in 15 minutes took 40 minutes to complete. Although I received a little refund from uber later on not meeting the time promised but whole experience was not that pleasant. While talking to driver he also mentioned the same problems as driver in the lyft told. In total, I feel following things will make ride sharing experience better RideShare premium - You share the ride but you pay a small premium for getting dropped off first. And algorithm reads and optimizes the route accordingly. Ride share premium would be definitely cheaper than individual rides, there might be some pros and cons of this idea Pros- People get from point A to B faster at affordable rates It reduces driver frustration as customer got ability to get premium service Cons- If more than one rider request premium, who would be catered first? Ability to upgrade the ride sharing to exclusive ride should be their in the ride so that a customer can talk to other customers in the ride and they can agree for a mutual upgrade as they are moving towards same destination and don't want more people to be added. Ride Sharing Control to driver: If driver sees that it is unreasonable to pick a passenger he/ she must have an ability to cancel the unreasonable pickup without being penalized. If anybody has any other ideas, please feel free to comment, my ideas might have lot of flaws in it as well. I just wanted to share the experiences of the the drivers whom i rode with and look for some possible solutions